Tag Archives: comic

Cooperation

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Anything besides time-sensitive tasks on which my future depends.

Yeah, my focus sucks lately. What can you do? I don’t tolerate caffeine or other stimulants at all, so I’m very much at the whim of my container. My poor, badly engineered, increasingly dysfunctional container, with its many worn-out parts. At least we’re all on good speaking terms. They’re not afraid to let me know when they’re unhappy. But according to the Facebook discussion from which I adapted this comic, everyone has these problems. Being easily distracted is universal.

Then again, the not easily distracted among us probably aren’t on Facebook.

This comic took forever because the Wacom tablet is getting wonky again. The power cable is touchy, and the pen keeps getting glitchy, and tonight something froze the entire keyboard and I had to do a hard reboot and lost some part of my work. How fortunate that I remembered to save as I was going along tonight. Sometimes I don’t. But in fact, it was the cable repeatedly disconnecting and the pen constantly increasing its sensitivity to the point of uselessness that reminded me to save.

End of the Line

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You may have started out as unremarkable composites of nickel and iron, cast out from your birthplaces and sent hurtling through the cosmos like so much space detritus casually tossed into predictable orbit, but today you are all shooting stars!

Obviously, we went out into the desert to observe last night’s meteor shower, which explains why this comic is nearly 14 hours late, in case anyone actually noticed. It was a really nice display, although being way out in the desert on the other side of the mountains (so that they blocked a lot of the city light) and not even starting to look up until after midnight probably improved the viewing. We have a place we go on BLM land and no one ever goes there. It’s weird that no one goes there, because it’s the best place for a lot of nighttime in the desert activities, but I don’t think we’ve ever seen anyone else there.

Someone joked about what meteors might be thinking, if meteors could think, and I maintained that it would be “AAAAAAAHHHHHH!” Because if you can think, we assume you can feel, and if you can feel, I can’t imagine the process of being ablated while tearing through the earth’s atmosphere is a pleasant one. After a thousand years of hanging around, smashing into anything at high velocity would be a shock. Although maybe being ejected from a comet is heartbreaking enough. Maybe they’re happy to burn up and fall to earth as perhaps a tiny granule of iron. Maybe it’s nice to be grounded again, even if you lose a huge part of yourself in the process.

I need to stop anthropomorphizing space rocks and go acquire food.

Silver Bullet

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I gave up yearning for normalcy decades ago, but sleeping at night would be nice. 

It’s been a weird week.

Yesterday I went to the store to buy my favorite kind of chocolate–organic, fair trade, sustainable, yadda, yadda, yadda–and some angel had left a coupon for my brand tucked into the shelf display! Hooray! But then I ate all the, and that made me sad. Contemplating the absence of chocolate pushed me over the edge. And that’s where this comic came from.

 

Real Smooth

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All I’m saying here is that, if I decided that I needed to shave a substantial portion of my head, I would at least mention it to the person who has to look at my head the most first. 

So The Man stated the other day that, if I wanted to draw comics about more personal issues relating to him, I had his permission. Granted, I’m 100 percent sure this isn’t what he was talking about, but this is what I drew.

It’s not even like I’ve never seen him without a beard–he was beardless when I met him–but it’s been a long time since he’s shaved. It was a rather conservative beard by any standard, but he refused to grow a more preposterous one, and I had grown used to his facial hair, and rather fond of it. And apparently the look on my face when he walked in like that really expressed my feelings wordlessly.

I would like to point out that panels 2-4 demonstrate Kübler-Ross’s 5 stages of grief: denial, anger, and bargaining in panel 2, depression in panel 3, and acceptance in panel 4.

Anyway, he promises he’s growing it back out, and the beard will return before I have a chance to get used to its absence.

Purr or Scratch?

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The dilemma is real, the struggle eternal. Fortunately, the kitty flow chart is a simple one.

Apparently, my genius cat, whose terrible behavior has been documented elsewhere in this blog, decided to swipe at The Man because–get this–he stopped petting her. You can’t win with cats. And yet, just as I’m sitting here writing this, she politely tapped on my hip to signify that she wanted to sit on my lap. So I should change my posture to accommodate that fleeting desire. Which lasted all of 25 seconds. Now she’s sitting on the desk looking suspiciously like she’s going to knock a mirror on the floor. I should take care of that.

In the meantime, you can consider buying my book, supporting my Patreon,  or ordering my merch.

Goth Mom Knows How to Suffer

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You don’t understand me! You’re probably not even my real mom! You probably kidnapped me from my real mom! My real mom is probably Marilyn Manson! Or Bela Lugosi!

It’s slightly troublesome to me that I really have no clue where this comic came from. Usually there’s some gamete of an idea–an event, an action, a memory–that spawns each comic. Yeah, there was the sort of goth PTA mom in last week’s cannibalism comic, but that connection came to me afterward. First was just the idea of a goth mom offering an upset kid absinthe and laudanum (the eyeliner idea came later, too, on the realization that even goth mom wouldn’t start with the hard stuff). Then the thought of how the kid of a goth mom would respond (exactly like the kid of any other mom) and then the Taylor Swift thing (her music is just so joyful, even when she’s petty or angry) and finally goth dad, who, naturally, will always assume the worst. Maybe that was a line out of an Addams Family movie or something like that. But what could be worse for goth parents than a kid who listens to upbeat pop?

Not sure what they’ll do now that they assume the worst. Search the kid’s computer for evidence of a Pinterest account? Arrange an intervention? An exorcism?

I happen to know a fair number of goth parents and they all seem to be doing a pretty good job of it. They can dress their kids in skulls and pentacles until they’re about 5, and then the kid turns around and only wants to wear polo shirts or pink tutus or something like that. It’s hard to rebel against goth mom. But goth mom expects your betrayal. She’ll love you even if you become an investment banker or a priest. Goth mom understands that the world is cruel and nobody understands you. Goth mom understands that better than anybody.

Dragon Comics 140

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Or unmelted cheese, I would imagine. Any cheese, really.

Another little slice of life here in Dragon’s Cave.

By the way, the trick to homemade mozzarella sticks is to freeze the cheese after you’ve breaded it but before you fry it. Otherwise, it melts before the outside gets crispy and loses its shape and leaks out everywhere. Of course, some people like that sort of thing.

The experimental breading is basically just pakora batter without the spices: garbanzo flour, water, and salt. Very tasty. Makes light and fluffy mozzarella sticks. Pleasing to children and other cheese-eating organisms.

 

So Many Books, So Many Books

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I mean really, in the grand scheme of things, what’s one more unread novel?

Back in the wild days before the internet (and, not coincidentally, before I spent 5 consecutive years doing literally nothing but studying books and how to write them), reading a couple novels a weeks came very naturally. Now it’s a big deal if I read a couple a month. Even graphic novels start to pile up; there are 2 on my desk right now, that have been sitting there for 6 weeks. I read 2 graphic novel (digital format) yesterday and one hard copy the week before. Tonight I was trying to finish up this very weird Roger Zelazny book I’ve been pecking away at in my down time all month, but I just couldn’t push through to the end.

This week alone, I’ve been sent 2 digital copies of novels I know nothing about, by people whom I have every reason to believe are perfectly cromulent authors whose books are totally worthy of being read, along with 2 hard copies last week, sent by authors I know quite well, of books I’ve already read but need to read again for professional reasons.

A couple years back, I spent about 3 months organizing my existing library, which comprises maybe 3000 volumes. It’s very spiffy, mixing a few different systems to suit my needs (most Library of Congress) and incorporating spine labels so I always know where particular volumes are and can always reshelve them properly. But that work doesn’t do anything about the sheer volume of volumes that keep arriving, covering every horizontal surface. I’ve always been OK with being a person who only reads maybe 2/3 of the books she brings home, but lately that number is skewing even less impressively. Maybe if I stopped screwing around on the Internet and playing Pokemon Go, I could clear away some of this work. But that’s not what’s going to happen.

What I’m trying to say is that this isn’t a comic strip drawing, but rather an actual image of me in my office. Please come dig me out. Bring librarians.

3D Dragon Comics 3

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And if you mess that one up, just turn over a new leaf and try once more. 

Not much to say about this; been in a weird space but didn’t want to write more depressing comics. It’s more fun to play with your toys, sometimes. Dragons need to go on interior journeys. Dragons need to lay their burdens down and only carry magic. Dragons need some empty space. Dragons need to relax.

Free Range Kids

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Rebecca looked on smugly, secure in the knowledge that her children were safe in their individual kennels while she fattened them up for Christmas. 

More baby cannibalism comics! Modest Proposal jokes never stop being funny. Ditto gags about PTA moms. Together, they’re pure comedy gold.

My Facebook page hosted a long discussion about this family in England where both parents gave up their lucrative careers to live on welfare and raise their children “off grid” without shoes or school or vaccinations or diapers or rules or weaning and is now trying to crowdsource their dream of buying land in Costa Rica so they can live a life of true independence. Cost to you, the non-consumer: $100,000. So far I guess they’ve gotten £47, which is probably £47 more than I would have made if I went on GoFundMe to beg for $100,000 to pay for my dream of self-sufficiency.

There was a lot of argument about the worst part of the story, but ultimately, the most superlative (best, worst, stupidest) part is their inability to recognize the irony of begging for money because you want to be self-sufficient. I’m not linking to their ridiculous story, because they’ve gotten too much publicity already.

The difference between free range and cage free, in the case of livestock, is that free range animals (chickens, we’re mostly talking about) can go outside, but cage free animals cannot. The difference between free range and non-free-range kids, as far as I can tell is that the non-free-range kids don’t want to go outside.